


A Thesis: On being submerged by fire

by kagrena (spacemagic)



Series: Theses: on women who walk through fire [2]
Category: Elder Scrolls
Genre: F/F, Other, Reconciliation, an epilogue to an epilogue
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-13
Updated: 2020-05-13
Packaged: 2021-03-02 23:01:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,550
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24164785
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spacemagic/pseuds/kagrena
Summary: After Red Mountain raged, in another time, and another world, amaranth, perhaps, a woman with a name that weighs heavy as a city of brass leaves opulence behind to seek to find the everlasting fire that burns up the edges of the world.(or: Kagrenac and Lorkhan speak again, after everything.)
Relationships: Kagrenac (Elder Scrolls)/Lorkhan, Kagrenac (Elder Scrolls)/Original Female Character(s)
Series: Theses: on women who walk through fire [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1743946
Comments: 8
Kudos: 9





	A Thesis: On being submerged by fire

**Author's Note:**

> I would recommend reading A Thesis: On Twelve Tones to help understand this, as it explains why I gender Lorkhan's in this way. My characterisation of Kagrenac is quite particular & you also get a better insight for her there.
> 
> Recommended soundtrack: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-WNYs9GwKM

The Capital, and the majesty of its courts, picked pomegranates seeded into silk gowns, the spilling of something red: that was what she left behind, to scour to the edge of the world.

It was a foolish undertaking, her lords and ladies had dripped into ears, a journey most treacherous, as she took off every heavy clasp, every piece of precious metal pierced through her skin, and slung it into water, watched the colour slink into the sea, the gold melting away. What queen refuses to be carried and cushioned by the pillowy dreams of other creatures, clipping their wings for sustenance, milk and honey? What could be found, could be discovered, could be seized and taken, that could not, at the centre of the universe, in the Capital?

What was there, here, at the edge of the world, past the end of the sentence? She had said: I will see with my own eyes and speak with my own hands. And what she had found so far was this:

There were burnt leaves, crisp smouldering, taste of smoke on the edge of your tongue as you crossed over the horizon, but there was no light, no broad grin of princely suns and moons that swept over the sky - only distant, unknown kings reigned the skies, that eclipsed soft blues on strange occasions, forgotten, ignored. Most of the time, there was smoke, there was the comforting lisp of the tides, and there was cold. It was the sort of cold that cradled your bones with a grip like metal. In between the blinks of a ghost of the sun, she could hear things in the salt and the stone.

It whispered things she could not discern, except for this: royalty counted for less than nothing. Nothing gold could glimmer on the surface of this blackened sea. 

The woman, whose scratched hands told stories of carved-out temples and bleeding libraries, stood on the edge of the world, knowing this. She was not a queen. Once, she had seized a crown, but between then and now she had tossed it into the sky where it shattered like glass and those who caught the fragments felt only rain. She was not a warrior. No blades, she carried, sharp enough to pierce the stream of dreaming-drinking-thinking-running-laughter of seventy thousand impossible thoughts a single being could hold within its skin. She was not a scholar. She had burnt all her scribblings into ash, all those fine thoughts and things, committed what mattered to memory, verses soft on her fingertips, yearning reaching through the stanzas. Want, she did. Want, she realised, she was allowed to. She would not constrain that into a flat face although it was hard to stop hiding when one’s life was an abstract accumulation of mirrors. 

The sea called to her, sung an ancient name that tasted like hot metal, _are you she? are you she?  
_

“I am she,” she said with her hands, which moved with precision, with delicacy. “I am she,” she said, as if she were still shaping brass.

The sea called to her, the skies called to her, the earth and the smoke and the darkness, the sun barely seen, called to her, called to her and asked her again for a name, _your name, from your hands,_ _the one you would have worn on her fingers._

She said it letter by letter. Her hands shake and sing the shell she wore, a sore and heavy name, that felt like a fault line along with the earth divided. 

_(Kagrenac.)_

The sea called, the skies and the earth too, the smoke and dark beyond her reach, they speak to her, they burn:

_You carved me up. Cut me to pieces. For the good of all our people, you said. This bounty would be ours, you told your people._

“I did.”

The words hang in the breeze. There is a wind that wraps around her like the softest cold.

_Was it? For the good of all?_

“No. Not all.”

_You don’t deny it._

She inclines her head.

“Do you hold a grudge?” 

_No._

“No?”

_I do not hold a grudge. I do not hold anything as cold as a grudge._

“Then why have you called me here, if not to break me?”

_I call for you because I love you._

The sea burned. The skies, they burned, clouds billowed with heat, the earth reddened and the wind was embers, a dance of fires, and the darkness, it was all burning, through the gripping cold that holds on to the very edge of what one might have misconstrued as a soul, all aflame.

 _I love you_ , it calls, it burns, and that it is, and she cannot shy from this, as her wings begin to flutter with fire, as her fingers shake, because it is true, because it it cannot be denied when the world says _I love you,_ so she cries out:

“How can you love me, given what I have wreaked, with my own hands?”

In response, the dark swathes of the tides are fires that reach up and crack the skies. In response, the clouds break into violet and brass and crimson and verdant greens, forests aflame in softness, in every tone she once claimed to know by heart before she locked it away from the world. In response, the following words cradle her ears even as they speak through thunder:

_Every movement you make with passion. Every movement you make with fire. How could I not love you?_

“Love is made. Love is built. I have destroyed, and been destroyed, utterly, with these hands. These hands have not loved in the longest time.”

The tide washes, back and forth. 

_They can love again._

And it is like a beckoning, for her fingers to trace some lost love letter in the sand, separated not by the lip of a crystalline bottle, but by years, but by the time that can be witnessed in the creases of her hands. She does not bend, or bow, however, to touch what is beneath her. She touches her brow, as if it is heavy: 

“I am afraid I have forgotten how.”

 _I would show you how to build again,_ call the burning seas _,_ call the sheets of rain _, I would show you – as you showed me, once, before I broke my crown and tore out my own heart._ And it is a voice that is warmth, that contains all the multitudes of warmth, in a place of its absence, on the cusp of the world, where fire is not yet known. _I would show you._

“How would you show me?” _  
_

_You would need to reach across the water. You would need to be close.  
_

“What if the water drowns my body? What if the waves bury me beneath the sea?”

_I would not drown you. I would not bury you. I would not take what is not given. I would only give – if you would let me, if you would receive. I can only promise you this._

There is no crooked smile dancing upon the flames, not the lingering scent of irony, in the smoke of burning leaves and ashen words. Not a jest or a game or something hidden by small smiles. Nothing coy. It was sincerity – and how she savoured the taste of it. 

“You ask for faith, of course. You ask for the most difficult thing to give.” 

The truth does not feel rough on her hands nor bitter on her tongue, this time. 

_I would.  
_

The woman is still, for a moment, as the flames begin to singe a stray braid that has fallen loose along her back, and softly curl upwards.

_Would you?_

She closes her eyes, and opens them.

It is not with desperation, that she throws herself into the sea that is now burning. It is not an action made in haste, without thought, as if sirens wail, the sky flashes, as if she is summoned by something beyond her. She moves slowly. Deliberately. She is afraid, as the earth blazes around her and the storms rumble like engines of beasts unknown, dark and furious, searing and curious, all the smoke and heat smelling like a beginning. This is a decision she will take. This is something she wants, beneath the tangled stories and half-truths she tells reflections of herself. 

When she falls beneath the ever-changing waters, and reaches across the water to sign a gentle greeting into being, she does not descend into an ever-spiralling abyss that she has dreamt of before: she finds the touch of another. She takes it in her fingertips, the hand of another, knowing it is not-so-other, a worn and weary hand that too has held the keen edge of a knife for too long, and with a gentle caress she finds what lies in its grasp: the heart. The heart, Her heart, her beloved’s heart, the heart of The World, Hers and hers, held gently by weathered palms, the both of them.

_I would have given you this. I would have always given you this freely.  
_

The woman does not cry, not until she feels what gentle means through the hands of another speaking softly into her palms, signing the words: _Let us start anew. Let us rebuild._


End file.
